Today we can officially announce the winners of the GIGABYTE Z170 March OC Madness contest, a two tier contest hosted on OC-ESPORTS where both ambient and extreme overclockers went head to head to compete for cash and hardware prizes. At the end of the competition we can congratulate France’s Nvidiaforever2 and Japan’s Keika for taking top spots in their respective leaderboards. Let’s a take closer look at the scoring in a little more detail.

Running throughout most of March and early April, the GIGABYTE March OC Madness contest consisted of two separate rounds, one for overclockers using extreme cooling including LN2 and one round exclusively for ambient, or non-sub-zero overclocking (20 degrees celsius or above). The idea is to attract overclockers, from all ends of the HWBOT league system with Enthusiasts, Rookies and Novices invited to compete on ambient cooling and Elite and Extreme Overclockers invited to go all out on LN2.

Each round contained three individual stages, some including CPU speed limitations designed to encourage memory tweaking. The other key rule was that all submissions must feature a GIGABYTE Z170 chipset motherboard, making this an entirely ‘Skylake’ platform affair.

In terms of prizes the winners of each round walked away with a tasty $500 USD. A prize draw was also added for all overclockers who competed in all stages of their respective round with three GIGABYTE Z170X-Gaming 3 motherboards up for grabs.